Saturday 25 February 2012 19.04 EST
First published on Saturday 25 February 2012 19.04 EST

It's a brave author who chooses boredom as the subject for a book. How to describe this least glamorous of emotions, or delve into its essential qualities, without concocting a truly dull tract? Peter Toohey's method is to whip through the history, meaning and artistic representations of boredom at such a jaunty pace that there's no time to be bored at all.

Toohey's objective is not to attempt to cure or prevent boredom, but to understand it, even praise it: it is, after all, something of a luxury, only proliferating when humans aren't too busy with the struggle for survival. That said, he is keen to prove that boredom is not, as many boredom scholars have posited, an invention of the Enlightenment, when leisure, introspection and self-absorption came to the fore. The word only arrived in the English language in the 19th century, the feeling, he argues, predates its name by thousands of years. Perhaps it even evolved as an emotional alarm bell – just as the sense of disgust warns one not to eat poisonous berries or raw sewage – to compel humans to escape a boredom-inducing situation before it starts chewing away at one's sanity.

Mental deterioration is a major distinguishing factor between "simple boredom" and "existential boredom", two wildly different conditions which share a name. The former would characterise, for instance, a long and monotonous car journey, while the latter, a more profound spiritual malaise, can deepen into depression, acute feelings of isolation, and incurable nihilism. The thesis is punctuated by Toohey's analysis of boredom-depicting artworks, several of which seem only tangentially illustrative of boredom, and literature: Jane Austen's Emma, Flaubert's Madame Bovary, Ibsen's Hedda Gabler, and the titan of the boredom genre, Goncharov's Oblomov.

There is a more recent addition to the canon of literary boredom, too: Jeffrey Archer's three-volume prison diaries, detailing the dreariness of his 725-day incarceration. Archer might not be too flattered to share a page with Hitler's favourite architect, Albert Speer, but both men found writing represented some relief from the seemingly endless tedium of jail, though Speer invented a more novel distraction. With guidebooks and maps, he visualised his daily exercise around the prison yard to be a walk starting out from Berlin; by the end of his 20-year confinement, he had proceeded all the way through Asia, across the Bering Strait and down the length of North America to Mexico.